SOURCE: Sheidley, William E. “Barnabe Googe in His Time—and Afterwards,” and “The Later Translations: Images of Life.” In Barnabe Googe, pp. 16-27; 100-17. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

BARNABE GOOGE IN HIS TIME—AND AFTERWARDS

I. GOOGE'S LITERARY REPUTATION

Almost entirely forgotten for over a hundred years, Googe and his works were exhumed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarians and bibliophiles.¹ Thomas Warton's matter-of-fact account set the tone for subsequent literary historians, whose distaste for Googe's writings is imperfectly hidden by scattered bits of grudging praise.² For some, Googe presented an opportunity to vent scholarly impatience or critical scorn. A speaker in Collier's Poetical Decameron remarks that Googe, “though a voluminous writer, and especially translator, has produced nothing original that I have ever seen worth preserving.”³ Rollins and Baker, although they give him generous space in their anthology, cannot refrain from observing that “Googe's first impulse to let his juvenilia lie in darkness was probably sound.”⁴ Perhaps Googe's reputation hits rock-bottom in Don Cameron Allen's devastating epithet, “subpoet.”⁵

But however repellent to refined sensibilities, Googe's works have had an undeniable value to historical scholarship. Long before Rollins and Baker recognized in the collection of short poems “a grim little testimonial to the continuing influence of Tottel's Miscellany,”⁶ the diligent Edward Arber in 1871 had reprinted it with introduction and notes as an important link in the chain of English poetry, calling Googe one of “the heralds, the forerunners, the teachers of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Johnson [sic].”⁷ Shortly thereafter, an elegant facsimile of one translation appeared,⁸ and Googe, thus accessible, began to attract the attention of specialists. To the student of Spanish influence on English literature, for example, he was important as the first Elizabethan to reflect it; for the historian of the pastoral, he offered the only clear anticipation of The Shepheardes Calender in English; for the scholar in quest of sources for ideas and images in Shakespeare and Spenser, the Zodiake provided a major repository; and for the writer interested in the influence of works Googe translated, he served as a crucial conduit.

It is mostly to critics interested specifically in the history of the short poem, however, that Googe owes his partial rehabilitation during the present century. As early as 1905, John Erskine saw in many of Googe's poems what he held indispensable to the successful lyric, an honest expression of personal feeling.⁹ To Yvor Winters, whose essay on the Renaissance lyric has commanded attention for over forty years, Googe formed an important stage in the native tradition of the plain style.¹⁰ Writers following Winters's suggestions have analyzed Googe's lyrics and their historical context with a care befitting works of stature, and the poems have been edited and anthologized, so that today they surely reach a wider and more appreciative audience than when they were first published.¹¹

Although occasionally his original works were acknowledged,¹² among his contemporaries Googe was mainly famous as a translator.¹³ Translation was the distinctive literary activity of Googe's generation, which labored to fill the empty shelves of the English library by the readiest expedient and to mesh the vernacular culture of England with the neo-Latin culture of Renaissance Europe at large.¹⁴ Most of the writers with whom Googe is associated were primarily translators, whether of Seneca's tragedies, Mantuan's eclogues, or Homer from the French. Many entered the service of the Protestant statesmen and clerics who had come to power with Elizabeth, just as Googe himself joined the household of his kinsman Sir William Cecil, later Lord Burghley.¹⁵ Their literary labors were designed to advance the general program of the new regime, which included purging the realm of vice, papistry, and dissension while educating the populace to the need for civil order, obedience, and a patriotism focused on the crown. In this context, “englishing” a foreign classic was a service to the nation—all the more so if it contained sound moral doctrine, Protestant polemic, or useful practical information. As for narrative poetry or the lyric, though it was well to demonstrate that English was as good a tongue for a sonnet¹⁶ as Italian or French, one had carefully to avoid seeming to espouse idleness or vice.

Under the influence of the rhetorical education they received at the hands of an older generation of humanists, Googe and his fellows believed in the power of poetry to move the mind to virtue;¹⁷ unlike the younger group of writers who supplanted them in the middle of their lives, however, their interest was always engaged more in the purpose being pursued than in the poetry itself. Their writings frequently have a rough-and-ready quality that makes them seem naive and rustic in comparison with the sophisticated craftsmanship of Sidney or Spenser. Caught thus between a paternal establishment whose projects and values served as their own and the advent of a brilliant new generation that would redefine English literary culture in less constrictive terms, most writers born in the 1530s and 1540s gave up original poetry quickly—if they ever tried it—and lapsed into virtual silence before 1580.¹⁸ …

III. A NOTE ON VERSE AND DICTION

The Fovre Bookes of Husbandry was the most durable of Googe's efforts—in part, perhaps, because he wrote it in prose. Early Elizabethan poetry sounded laughably primitive in the age of Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, and Jonson, and its verse and diction still remain the greatest obstacles to the appreciation of Googe and his contemporaries. The poulter's measure and fourteener couplets favored in the 1560s and 1570s have struck the ears of most critics as jog-trot doggerel, beginning with Warton, who held that “this metre of Sternhold and Hopkins impoverished three parts of the poetry of Queen Elizabeth's reign.”¹⁹ Because of the large type and narrow pages in use during the 1560s, most of Googe's fourteeners were printed broken after the fourth foot, which happily charges the caesura with the force of a line ending and eliminates the tendency of the long lines to sag in the middle.²⁰ Since Googe followed the principles Gascoigne would enunciate²¹ of fitting light and heavy syllables into a rigidly conceived and continuously asserted prosodic matrix of alternating stresses, regular caesuras, and end-stopped lines, dividing his fourteener couplets or poulter's distichs automatically produced little epigrammatic abcb stanzas.²² The effect is especially felicitous in short poems, where he strives for concision. Sometimes Googe breaks with the set norms, and the consequent rhythmic variations, because they are so rare, carry exceptional force. His use of spondees for emphasis struck Winters as an important anticipation of the strong and various rhythms attained by the later Elizabethans.²³

In his deployment of the rhetorical figures whose presence indicated artfulness in early Elizabethan poetry²⁴ and in his adherence to given principles of decorum,²⁵ Googe remains, to be sure, a man of his time, but despite his artistic conservatism he is less imprisoned by convention than some. His elevated and figurative language seldom obscures the meaning it seeks to advance, and he can parody the kind that does. His base or rude style depends not on recherché archaism but on the sharp concretion of the spoken word. To a reader unfamiliar with the works of Grimald, Turbervile, Howell, or the translators of Seneca, Googe's poetry may sound primitive and quaint, but anyone inured to the endemic peculiarities of early Elizabethan style will hear a distinct, refreshing voice with something meaningful to say. In discussing the relationship of writers to established attitudes toward language and reality, Robert Pinsky has argued that “it takes considerable effort by a poet either to understand and apply those attitudes, for his own purposes, or to abandon them. The alternative to such effort,” he goes on, “may be to lapse into mere mannerism or received ideas.”²⁶ Although Googe certainly deals in received ideas, he understands them, possesses them, and, whether composing his own statements or … translating those of others, he applies them to real and vital concerns. His modes of expression rely heavily on his models in the rhetorics, the classics, and Tottel's Miscellany, but he escapes mannerism by firmly subjugating style to statement and cliché to the case at hand.

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THE LATER TRANSLATIONS: IMAGES OF LIFE

In his life of Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville used terms like those of “The Ship of Safegarde” to explain that his own poetry, drawing more “upon the Images of Life, than the Images of Wit,” is addressed “to those only, that are weather-beaten in the Sea of this World, such as having lost the sight of their Gardens, and groves, study to saile on a right course among Rocks, and quick-sands.”²⁷ Similarly, Googe, especially after weathering his first trip to Ireland in 1574, chose no longer to range through the zodiac of his own wit but to confine himself to the proven imaginings of others, notably Palingenius, to whom he returned for the definitive Zodiake of 1576. Subsequently, he found guidance through the moral and practical perils of life in three new books he translated between 1577 and 1579. The work of this prolific period, together with two legends from ecclesiastical history in The Shippe of Safegarde (1569), a timely anti-Papist volume of 1570, and Googe's last publication, a medical pamphlet printed in 1587, is the concern of this final chapter.

Although he imagined translation patronized by the Muses, Googe pursued his art according to the simplest of principles. Striving always for a “faythfull and true translation,” he aimed merely to make useful works available in English. He rendered the texts “in some places verse for verse, & word for worde.” “In other places (where I haue not precisely obserued so strickte an order) yet,” he insists, “haue I no whit swarued from the perfect minde of the autoure.”²⁸ His diverse translations all reflect the conviction that he could better serve his readers and please his patrons with satiric, didactic, and practical writings than with works of fancy, even if purged of sin. The small library he “englished” deals with topics ranging from the miracles of a martyred bishop to the best way to hatch duck eggs. Reading through it reinforces the notion of the universal curiosity of the Renaissance mind and inspires admiration for the endurance and workmanship of the translator.

I. THE TALES FROM CHURCH HISTORY

The two narratives Googe versified from “Eusebius” and included in The Shippe of Safegarde occupy a middle ground between translation and original composition. Googe's source was the Latin version of the Ecclesiastical History made by Tyrannius Rufinus around a.d. 401. Rufinus scrupled neither to revise the Greek original when it suited him nor to add details or whole incidents to the record.²⁹ One such passage supplies the second of Googe's stories, to be discussed below, although it appears in Book VII rather than Book IV as his headnote wrongly affirms. The first tale, “The death of S. Polycarpus, Bishop of Smyrna, and disciple to saint Iohn,” comes from Book IV, Chapter 15. A comparison of Googe's version with Rufinus's, which in this case is a close rendering of the Greek,³⁰ will show how Googe adapts his source to suit his juvenile English audience.

Although he follows the historical narrative incident by incident, Googe suppresses some points, expands on others, and strives always to eliminate confusing issues, clarify obscure passages, heighten the drama, and drive home the moral point. To set up the conflict between “The poore afflicted Christian flocke” (1. 5) and its wolvish Roman persecutors, he provides a dozen lines (fourteeners) of prologue naturally absent from the original. His simplified version of how the eighty-six-year-old bishop was arrested slips no opportunity to evoke sympathy for the victim and hatred for the “cursed Catchpolles” (1. 41) who torment him. When, for example, Polycarp's captors hurry him down from a wagon, causing him to hurt his foot,³¹ Googe has it that “they threw him headlong downe” and “hurt him verie sore” (11. 88-89).

Googe had to make other changes in the ancient story of the martyrdom of a saint to render it suitable for Tudor readers. While the source stresses the miraculous proleptic vision of fire experienced by Polycarp on the eve of his capture and the uncanny way in which his blood, coursing from a wound made by the impatient executioner's sword, extinguishes the towering flames that surround him, Googe deletes references to the bishop's “dreame” whenever he can and allows that the fire was quenched by blood only “In diuers places of the pile” (1. 205). Likewise, he totally rewrites Polycarp's final prayer in Protestant language. When God's voice booms out over the arena, it says in Rufinus's Latin, “fortis esto, Polycarpe, et viriliter age” (Mommsen, p. 343; sig. E3v), “Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man” (Lake, p. 347), but in Googe's English it says, “Be of good comfort Polycarpe / and keepe thy conscience well” (1. 94), as the translator steers away from anything that might be misread as merely pagan heroism. While for Eusebius and Rufinus Polycarp's sainthood derives in part from the miracles that attended his death, the martyred bishop interests Googe, as an interpolated passage (11. 50-58) makes clear, almost entirely as an exemplar of steadfast resistance to temptation in face of threatened physical torment—not unlike the Protestant martyrs who went to the stake in England during his childhood. Thus the tale's theme harmonizes more fully than Googe saw fit to claim with the purport of The Ship of Safegarde itself.

The brief story of “A Priest of Apollo straungely conuerted” is less moralistic; it deals in irony and wonder and rounds off the book with a happily-ever-after conclusion. High in the Alps stands a temple where many repair to hear the oracles of the god. When “One Gregorie, a christian Bishop olde” (1. 10) spends a night there in his travels, the attendant priest entertains him by explaining the details of his cult. After Gregory leaves in the morning, however, he discovers that the idol has fallen silent. That night the god informs him in a dream that he cannot speak without the bishop's permission. Catching up with him on the morrow, the priest reminds Gregory of his former hospitality and the bishop expresses his gratitude by writing:

Unto Apollo Gregorius greeting sendes,
I giue thee leaue, do as thou didst before.

(11. 81-82)

When this paper is placed on the altar, “The Idoll streight beginnes againe to prate” (1. 89), but Apollo has lost his standing with the priest, who follows Gregory, and, “falling flat” before him as he has previously done before his idol, begs to learn about the stronger God, is converted, and ultimately succeeds his patron as bishop.

Googe again follows Rufinus point for point but enriches the account with details of setting, action, and dialogue.³² His brisk pentameter quatrains advance the narrative without interruption for sermon or satire; in concision, structure, and wit the poem maintains the highest standards of the Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes. It is unfortunate that Googe found these stories “tedious,” as he tells his sisters-in-law in the dedication, and wrote no more. His public and satiric interests had gained the upper hand, and his next work, addressed to no less a personage than the queen, aimed less to foster virtue in the young or amuse them with stories than to enlighten the nation at large about the enemy of the day.

II. THE POPISH KINGDOME

It is pleasant to surmise that the “learned Maister Bale” who encouraged Googe to translate Palingenius also introduced him to the congenially Protestant works of Thomas Naogeorgus or Kirchmeyer.³³ Twice an exile for his reformed beliefs and an outspoken Protestant in print, the old antiquary may well have placed in the hands of his young friend such tracts as the vehemently anti-Catholic satire Regnum Papisticum and a handbook for a reformed ministry called Agriculturae Sacrae Libri Quinque.³⁴ Although his translation of The Popish Kingdome did not appear until 1570, some seven years after Bale's death, Googe explained that he had done the two books of “The Spirituall Husbandrie” appended to give bulk to the volume “long before.”³⁵

Naogeorgus, a German cleric of independent mind, is primarily remembered for his Latin plays, including the intensely anti-Papist Pammachius (1538), whose impact was great enough to precipitate an inquisition by Bishop Gardiner when it was produced at Cambridge in 1545.³⁶ Apparently ill-disposed to adhere on the basis of tradition or authority to doctrines that seemed to him erroneous, Naogeorgus set himself up not only against Rome but against the Wittenberg reformers as well. The Regnum Papisticum rings with the sarcastic fervor of the outsider to whom everything with which he does not agree appears a conscious fraud perpetrated by men of power and evil motives. His view of the Roman church as composed entirely of knaves and fools animated by greed and fear narrows the poem's emotional range, but the oversimplification makes the work an effective piece of propaganda. It was with a sure sense of purpose that Googe chose to publish The Popish Kingdome in 1570, in the midst of a crisis in the conflict between England and Rome, as a study of the queen's “greatest aduersarie.”

The general argument of the poem is simple: the Pope, or Antichrist, by establishing himself as the arbiter of who is saved and who is damned, has gained sway over everyone foolish enough to believe him. He uses this power to extort wealth and other worldly rewards, presiding over a hierarchy of graft and emulation through which the “lothsome poyson” (fol. 17v) of his avarice and pride seeps out into the world at large (cf. fol. 27v). Since for Naogeorgus salvation is God's free gift to all believers and cannot be earned through good works or bought from the clergy, the Pope and all his train are engaged in a gigantic confidence racket, peddling through all their manifold rituals and other operations something that is not theirs to sell.

The first two books survey the ranks of the clergy. The extravagance of their claims to authority and the complex distinctions among their titles and duties have a Lilliputian absurdity, but Naogeorgus does not regard the Papists with any amusement: their worldly power shapes the fate of nations; their greed strips the people of the fruits of their labor. The third book anatomizes the main rites of the church in ironic terms, showing how the Mass, pilgrimages, worship of relics, and the rest are used to prey on the anxieties of the faithful.

Book Four, which has been useful to students of late medieval and Renaissance popular customs,³⁷ mocks traditional holiday ceremonies. Following his usual satiric strategy, Naogeorgus gives a deadpan, literal-minded account of symbolic rituals and semiserious or entirely recreative revelry, viewing the old customs as ignorant superstition or dangerous idolatry. Here his humorless tone, which was effective enough in ridiculing “the iesture straunge … And shuffling vp and downe of Clarkes” (fol. 10v) in the Mass, becomes tiresome, even when punctured by irony. Although a concluding complaint about the religious wars and persecutions to which German Protestants were subjected and which Englishmen in 1570 had reason to fear reminds us that the poem treats an issue of urgent seriousness, it is nonetheless refreshing now and then to catch in a flash of energetic verse or a vivid image a hint that the poet and his translator were not entirely immune to the beauty of the customs they described—as in these lines on a Christmas ceremony:

This done, a woodden childe in clowtes is on the aultar set
About the which both boyes and gyrles do daunce and trymly jet,
And Carrols sing in prayse of Christ, and for to helpe them heare,
The Organs aunswere euery verse, with sweete and solemne cheare.

(fol. 45)

To establish that this is idolatrous, Naogeorgus goes on to compare it to the “Coribants … vpon the mountaine Ide,” who sang and beat on brass pans to hide the crying of the newborn Jupiter from his father. Here even the pagan parallel is charged with exotic fascination, but the general impression of the popish kingdom conveyed by Book Four is of a world gone mad with inane processions, frantic efforts to ward off evil spirits, divination, dancing, drunkenness, and lechery. On Corpus Christi Day, for example, everyone parades behind a loaf of bread that is protected from the “doung” of “some mad birde” (fol. 53v) by a rich canopy; at Shrovetide the same fools “beare a torde, that on a Cushion soft they lay, / And one there is that with a flap doth keepe the flies away” (fol. 48).

As [Brooke] Peirce says ([“Barnabe Googe: Poet and Translator.” Diss. Harvard, 1954.] p. 104), The Popish Kingdome is better satire than the controversial pamphlets it resembles, and Googe's translation enriches it with a vigorous and colorful English idiom: the appurtenances of Roman religion are “gewgawes” and “trumperies” (fol. 9); Jesuits will be damned with other “rifraffe” (fol. 25); and unbelievers receive no grace from baptism, “though ten times in the fludde they sowsed be” (fol. 31). Although he remains close to the original, Googe caters to his public by deleting learned allusions, explaining confusing terms, and adding vivid descriptive details.³⁸

The two books of “The Spirituall Husbandrie” lack the vigor and precision of the longer poem.³⁹ Rather than distorting and exaggerating actual men and manners in order to satirize them, Naogeorgus develops a bookish extended simile like that of The Ship of Safegarde. Man's mind is a field; God planted seeds of grace and virtue there, but Satan sowed weeds and thistles. After the Fall, God persuaded Adam to become a good husbandman of his soul, but in subsequent generations Satan's cockles sprang up again to harm the crop. Since the Incarnation, good seeds are found in the word of God preached by Jesus and the apostles: the New Testament is “the arte of husbandrie” (fol. 65). The weeds of heresy and superstition still spring up; the rock of sin still breaks the plow. But God sends “learned labourers” (fol. 65) to till the field, spiritual husbandmen whose requisite background, constitution, and training are developed in standard humanist terms. After a full presentation of “the learnings liberall” (fol. 69) and a defense of study on the basis that its alternative is sloth, the first book ends with an attack on pride. The second begins with a similar discussion of avarice, a particular danger to the learned, whose sins are worse than those of the lewd, Naogeorgus affirms, inveighing against lust and gluttony and elegant living. Thus chastened and prepared, the learned preacher is advised to sow the seed he finds in the word of God, confining himself to scripture, especially the books of Moses, the Prophets, and the Gospels. At times his enthusiasm for the inspired parts of the Bible seems to be leading Naogeorgus toward a contempt for human learning similar to that of the “franticke Anabaptistes” (fol. 72v) he condemns: “No neede is here to vexe the minde with turning many bookes,” he says (fol. 78v), expressing an attitude that may well have given his studious translator pause. But since the Holy Ghost, like many “prophane wryters” (fol. 79v), tends to be something of an allegorist, Naogeorgus would allow the preacher what help he needs to find out the hidden meaning and explain it to his flock. Book Two therefore ends with a reading list of sacred and secular works presented in the form of a plan for arranging the minister's bookshelf. The part of the treatise that Googe translated, then, forms a coherent introduction to the calling of the Protestant ministry. As a comparatively readable presentation of stock moral doctrine and some key points of Protestant theology, it provides a suitable counterweight to the invective of the longer poem. But neither work approaches the curious appeal of the two books that Googe, with seven more years of hard experience on his back, next undertook to translate.

III. THE OVERTHROW OF THE GOUT

In 1577 Abraham Veale issued a little book entitled The Overthrow of the Gout / Written in Latin Verse, by Doctor Christopher Balista. A translation of two Latin poems by Christophe Arbaleste, a physician and sometime Reformation preacher in Switzerland, the volume is dedicated by “B.G.” to “his very good Frende” Richard Masters, the queen's physician.⁴⁰ Although “the verse in Latin is not very eloquent,” Googe confesses himself “somthing delighted with the writer” and says he set about the work “partely for mine owne recreation” but mainly “for the benefit of diuerse my freends troubled with that disease.” In this he follows his author, who several times mentions with outrage the affliction of his patient, Philip of Platea, Bishop of Sion (Sedun), Switzerland, and seems to have written the poem while working on his case.

The modern reader of the first poem in The Overthrow of the Gout, a rendering in 344 broken fourteeners of Balista's “In Podagram Concertatio,” will note a tension between its sophisticated mock-heroic machinery and its naively confident presentation of remedy after outlandish remedy to be prepared from the herbs, spices, minerals, and animal substances that were the stock in trade of ancient pharmacology. But as Googe's other translation of 1577, the Fovre Bookes of Husbandry, attests, the extremes of literary refinement could coexist in the sixteenth century with the most practical information. Amusing as it may be, Balista's heroic style does not belittle his subject, but rather suggests that, to the afflicted, the battle against crippling gout is indeed a matter of epic seriousness. Balista uses elevated passages as a frame for his lists of remedies and rules for good living. His occasional digressions to recount incidents relating to the gout from classical literature or to give a short panegyric on the virtues of swine grease or “Colewort” reveal that, despite its concentration on the details of preparing and applying medication, the poem is a piece of humanistic book learning. Balista compiles all the remedies for the gout that his scholarship has been able to unearth.⁴¹ Any one of scores of herbs or fats, applied in every conceivable fashion, should put the sufferer back on his feet in no time, but Balista seems drawn to the most nauseous preparations, and Googe makes it a point of honor to follow him without batting an eye,⁴² matter-of-factly reproducing the formulae for turning goose grease, urine, bird droppings, seaweed, and “Beauers stones” into sovereign remedies, and helpfully adding alternatives or supplying idiomatic English names in the margin. A prescription for applying to the feet a poultice made from wax and the ashes of a crow that has been buried alive in horse manure is offered with characteristic confidence: it will make “the poore diseased man, / to go without a stay” (sig. C1v).

The much shorter poem (sixty-six fourteeners) that closes the volume, “A Dialogue betwixt the Gout and Cri. Balista,” serves as an envoy to the whole. As before, Balista blends wit with sympathy for victims of the gout and a general Christian-humanist moralism. Gout opens the poem with a woeful lament. Like her own victims, she is stabbed with pain and can walk no faster than a tortoise. “Alas,” she cries, “and shall I dye?” “Thou shalt,” the poet intrudes, giving his name and announcing pompously that he is the one responsible for bringing her to the point of death (sig. C6). When Gout complains, he taxes her with having plagued virtuous men, and when she then pleads for pity, he agrees to spare her on two conditions: that she will release Bishop Philip from his torments and that she will henceforth afflict only the wicked, especially gluttons (sig. C7v).

In arguing that Googe was indeed the “B.G.” who translated The Overthrow of the Gout, Peirce remarks that it must have appealed to his fondness for “encyclopedic trivia” (p. 168). More than that, Balista's little book gave him a chance to combine his scholarly, moral, and poetic concerns with the interest in medicine and horticulture evident elsewhere in his works to an unquestionably utilitarian purpose.

IV. THE FOVRE BOOKES OF HUSBANDRY

Googe had still more to say on medicinal herbs in a long digression interpolated into his version of the Fovre Bookes of Husbandry by Conrad Heresbach. This handsomely printed prose treatise of well over 150,000 words was the most popular of Googe's books apart from the Zodiake. It was issued three times during Googe's life (1577, 1578, and 1586), again in 1596, 1601, and 1614, and in a revised version by Gervase Markham in 1631. The esteem in which it was held is justified by the interest, usefulness, and readability of its contents.

The original, Rei rusticae libri quatuor, is part of a series of works on rural subjects composed during his retirement by Heresbach (1496-1576), a Rhineland humanist and servant of the Duke of Cleves.⁴³ It compiles the teachings of ancient and modern authorities on (as Googe expresses it in his subheadings) “earable ground, tyllage, and pasture”; “Gardens, Orchardes, and Wooddes”; “feeding, breeding, and curing of Cattell”; and “Poultry, Foule, Fishe, and Bees.” Each book introduces one or more experts who respond to the inquiries of their companions by discoursing at large on the excellence and practical details of their occupations.

At the start Heresbach portrays in Cono a learned gentleman like himself whose daily activities include study and prayer and who can defend in good set terms his withdrawal from court to country, so that when he cites Varro, Theophrastus, Cato, Columella, Dioscorides, and Laurentius in a single breath (sigs. D3-D3v) or quotes at length in verse from Vergil or Horace, it seems no less probable than when he explains the best arrangement of farm buildings by leading his interlocutor on a tour of his estate or names the tools in his toolshed as he points to them one by one. But when in Book Three four herdsmen demonstrate similar learning as they pass a holiday in conversation under a tree by preference to the tavern or when Melisseus in Book Four regales his friends by quoting long passages on bee-keeping from the Georgics, it becomes clear that verisimilitude did not interest Heresbach and that he used the dialogue form primarily as a way to organize the voluminous information he had gleaned from his studies. Having decided to devote himself to cultivating his lands, like a true humanist Heresbach read everything he could find on the subject and set forth his knowledge in a pleasant form for the benefit of others.

One of his beneficiaries was Googe, who had himself gone to farming, or at least gardening, at Kingston in Kent after his first trip to Ireland and who was looking forward eagerly to the day when he could take possession of his father's lands in Lincolnshire.⁴⁴ For the “further profite and pleasure” of his English readers, Googe added what he could from “myne owne readinges and obseruations, ioyned with the experience of sundry my freendes.” Although he admits that some of what he takes by way of Heresbach from “the olde auncient husbandes, as well Greekes as Latines,” (sig. (iij)) concerns plants foreign to England, he is confident that they can be naturalized—even the vine, which used to be grown in England and should be reintroduced for the benefit of the realm.

Googe devotes a full page to listing the authorities on which he and Heresbach have drawn. After “The Byble, and Doctors of the Churche,” he gives fifty-nine Greek and Latin writers, and then, in a separate group, he names eighteen Englishmen, some of whom are authors, some his neighbors and acquaintances.⁴⁵ “My freend Wylliam Prat, very skilful in these matters,” contributes a recipe for preparing asparagus (sig. G6v); from “Maister Ihon Franklin of Chart in Kent, who was in his life time a skilfull husband, and a good housekeeper,” comes a treatment for ailing horses (sig. S8). “Maister Fytzherbert, a Gentleman of Northamptonshyre, who was the fyrst that attempted to wrighte of husbandry in England,” is quoted in extenso for a way to cure a “Sheepe that haue a woorme in his foote” (sig. S7v).⁴⁶ Such interpolations, along with more personal asides like the eulogy of his grandmother (sig. X7v) or the praise of Sir Thomas Challoner's horsewarden (sig. Q2) mentioned above, may be slightly unnerving to a reader who recalls that he is supposed to be hearing the words of Chenoboscus or Hippocomus as written by Heresbach, not the first-person discourse of Barnabe Googe. That Googe felt it proper to “increase” Heresbach in this fashion and at the same time could insist in the preface to the Gout that one ought not to be “to curious in an other mans woork” reflects the peculiar nature of the body of lore contained in the Husbandry, which grew and evolved from redaction to redaction, from Heresbach and his sources through Googe and his to Markham's revision and beyond, as if with a life of its own.

Googe is nonetheless quite right in the epistle to the reader when he judges that, despite his contributions, it would not be just, “as diuers in the like case haue done,” to issue the book under his own name. Indeed, he adds only one new passage of more than a page in length, the discussion of medicinal herbs (sigs. +5v-Aa1v) included “because maister Hersbach hath shewed you before in his Garden many good hearbes, and yet not whereto they serue” (sig. +6). Googe cites various authorites, including Cardanus, Mathiolus, and Hieronymus Tragus,⁴⁷ but his personal enthusiasm for actually growing, collecting, and distilling herbs is apparent. He tells of receiving angellica seeds from “that vertuous and godly Lady, the Lady Golding in Kent” (sig. +6v), reports that cardiaca grows “plentifully in Surry” (sig. +8v) while “Pennygrasse” is found “by the shadowy Ditches, about great Peckham in Kent” (sig. +7v), and insists “that you doo not distill them, as the vnskilful doo,” in metal vessels, but only in glass (sig. Aa1). Earlier, in the third book, he illustrates a discussion of black ellebore root, “once brought vnto me … from Darndal in Sussex, …” with a picture of the plant, “for your better knowledge.” But Googe like Heresbach feels more comfortable relying on authority than on experience. He ends paraphrasing Mathiolus (sigs. R4-R4v), and even the picture, although not a direct copy, appears to be imitated closely from one given by Tragus.⁴⁸

The main effect of Googe's interpolations is to add a little English flavor to the foreign text. He completes a survey of cheeses with some discriminating commentary on the product of various regions of England, capped by an epigram from “our English Martial,” John Heywood (sig. T3v); he endorses Heresbach's opinion of the voraciousness of sows by recalling one that devoured a child in Sussex, “to the pitifull discomfort of the parent” (sig. T6); and notes in the margin English applications of the methods described. In the epistle dedicatory to his 1631 revision, Gervase Markham complained that Googe had not gone far enough in adapting the book to English conditions: the work was “taught to speake English by a learned Gentleman Master Googe, who was so faithful to the first Author that it became an vtter stranger to our Climate” (sigs. A2-A2v). Googe's version won the critical esteem of William Webbe, however, who remarked in 1586 that Googe “deserued much commendation, as well for hys faythfull compyling and learned increasing the noble worke, as for hys wytty translation of a good part of the Georgickes of Virgill into English verse.”⁴⁹

The terms of Webbe's praise suggest the reasons for the book's success and the nature of Googe's accomplishment in teaching it to speak English. He delivered to his countrymen a practical handbook on agriculture—so used, as annotations in some surviving copies attest—that was also a learned treatise, a commendation of the simple country life, and a tour de force of literary art. In the view of agricultural history, the Husbandry stands out for having brought to England advanced methods practiced in the Low Countries.⁵⁰ For the student of literature its significance lies in its successful combination of so many seemingly disparate elements.

Although it may have diminished Googe's reputation not to print his translations from the Georgics separately, they were for him an integral part of their larger context. Peirce, who has studied them along with the other snippets of verse scattered through the Husbandry …, shows that Googe neither offers a word-for-word literal gloss on his originals nor attempts to reduplicate their more subtle refinements in English. Rather, he subdues them to the purpose at hand, striving to make accessible to the reader the information they contain.

With Vergil's bees, that information involves also a notation of the commendable industry and orderliness of the hive that allows Heresbach and Googe to sustain the sequence of moral asides that drop with ease and regularity from their pens. The Husbandry opens with a version of the familiar debate over the relative merits of service to the prince and otiose retirement, attended as always by attacks on the corruption of the times. In his dedication to Sir William Fitzwilliams, then leaving active service in Ireland, Googe seconds the preference for the country life, and near the end of Book One he adds a bitter aside about the unruly depredations of upstarts like those he attacks in “Egloga tertia,” including an epigram from Claudian and an English proverb to enforce the point.

Like Balista, Heresbach tried to make his treatise not only profitable but pleasant as well, and his translator followed his lead. Vivid descriptive passages and occasional poems, jokes, and stories help the reader along. Heresbach recalls how the sound a walnut tree makes before it falls once frightened people in Antandro out of the baths and into the street (sig. O4v); he describes a gooseliver he saw at the Diet of Worms that weighed a full four pounds (sig. X4v); he even repeats a tall tale—“when I was Embassador in England, it was told me by men of good credite”—of a tree in Scotland whose fruit, if it falls into the sea, turns into ducks (sig. X5v). Googe, as we have seen, contributes some anecdotes of his own and renders Heresbach's poised Latin into a zesty colloquial English. Once, he feels compelled to disagree with his author in vehement terms. After patiently following Heresbach's detailed account of the behavior and usefulness of cats as long as he can, Googe finally breaks off, ignoring further material on their excretory habits, the loyalty of castrated toms, and so on, and exclaims, “For my part I would rather counsell you to destroy your Rattes and Mise with Traps, Banes, or Weesels: for besides the sluttishnesse & lothsomenesse of the Catte (you know what she layes in the Malt heape) she is most daungerous and pernicious among children, as I mee self haue had good experience” (sig. U4v).⁵¹

The charm of the Husbandry lies in its hospitality to all kinds of topics, from the most private opinion to the broadest public concern, and to all levels of tone, from levity through matter-of-fact exposition to solemn piety. That the principles of unity and decorum never seem to be outraged may result from the book's total disregard for both, and yet the final impression it leaves on the reader is one of coherence, reliability, and pleasurable interest.

V. THE PROUERBES OF SANTILLANA

The last of the series of translations Googe published during the later 1570s promises more than its predecessors, but it delivers less. Like the Husbandry, The Prouerbes of the noble and woorthy souldier Sir Iames Lopes de Mendoza Marques of Santillana, with the Paraphrase of D. Peter Diaz of Toledo, is a collective effort: the wisdom of the ages and of personal experience versified by an aristocrat, expounded by his learned chaplain, and presented in English with a modest contribution here and there by the translator. Don Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, Primer Marqués de Santillana (1398-1458), was one of the most important literary and political figures of his time in Castile.⁵² A good poet himself, in native and medieval modes as well as in the new Italian manner, he patronized humanistic learning by assembling a large library and harboring a number of scholars in his court, one of whom was Doctor Pedro Diaz.⁵³ King Juan II requested the Proverbios for the edification of his son, Prince Enrique. The work was completed in 1437 and immediately became popular, circulating first in manuscript and then in print—twenty-nine editions before the end of the sixteenth century.⁵⁴ The translation did not enjoy a similar success, but its contents have interest as a reflection of English literary taste after two decades of Elizabethan rule and as an index of Googe's concerns and abilities at the end of his literary career.

Moreover, the book contains a prose life of Santillana that represents the first and perhaps the only publication in English of a work by Fernando del Pulgar, author of the Libro de los claros varones de Castilla (Toledo, 1486).⁵⁵ Googe found Pulgar's portrait of the Marqués appended unsigned to the text of the Proverbios he evidently used, a combined edition in Spanish of “Seneca's” proverbs and those of Santillana, both glossed by Diaz, printed in 1552.⁵⁶ His version of Pulgar's Spanish is close enough to account for the observation of one reader unaware of its source that “the Elizabethan English curiously suggests the Spanish of Santillana's own day.”⁵⁷

As Pulgar portrayed him, Santillana must have appealed to Googe not only for his exemplary learning and virtue, but also for a more personal reason: like Googe, Santillana had to fight to regain his patrimony.⁵⁸ No doubt the parallel was not lost on Cecil, to whom Googe dedicated The Prouerbes in the confidence that both its author and its doctrine would be welcome to his moralistic patron.

During the 1570s, works of moral didacticism found increasing favor in the eyes of the established leaders of the realm, while amatory lyrics and tales fell ever more under suspicion as conducive to vice. For Googe, the Marqués of Santillana fills the role of the moralizing Gnomaticus in Gascoigne's The Glasse of Government (1575), setting down the precepts of virtue for a promising member of the younger generation. Santillana claimed in his “Prólogo” to be speaking as a father to his son after the manner of Solomon in the biblical proverbs,⁵⁹ and he stresses in the text as well the superior wisdom, virtue, and reliability of age over youth.⁶⁰ As the father of growing sons himself, Googe perhaps approved the doctrine as much as he knew Cecil would, but a good part of his delight in the work must have arisen from the learning displayed in the gloss.

In proverb 12 (fol. 27v)⁶¹ Santillana declares that the reason for study is to aid in the reprehension of sin—just what the book seeks straightforwardly to do. The hybrid text combines the qualities of the medieval didactic lyric and the humanist treatise, surrounding Santillana's concise and allusive aphorisms⁶² with a rich embroidery of explications, analogues, and authorities. Despite the intervening glosses, the proverbs are not entirely separable but form the stanzas of a continuous moral poem. Like many, it lacks an adequate structure.⁶³ Diaz frequently points out relationships between stanzas, but aside from ending with age and death, the Marqués seems merely to have set down all the things Prince Enrique would need to know in the order they happened to come to mind. Drawing on the ancients, the scriptures, the church fathers, and medieval and modern writers,⁶⁴ he dispenses the familiar tenets of Christian stoicism at tiresome length.

The most serious weakness of The Prouerbes is the absence of an authorial personality. Only when he descends from morals to manners to expound a more worldly kind of wisdom does the Marqués escape bookishness. “Flee Taletellers,” the reader is advised (7); “be comformable to the time” (20); and pick a wife not for her money but for her tractability (43, 44). Once, he even approaches the rueful self-irony that distinguishes some of Googe's own short poems, in proverb 87, which concludes:

Ofte haue I found my selfe by speache
          in thrall and trouble brought:
But neuer yet for keeping of
          my toung, I suffred ought.

The Proverbios have been praised for their mnemonic qualities,⁶⁵ but in Googe's version few are easily remembered—or even apprehended. In rendering Santillana's stanza of four lines of eight syllables alternating with four of four as two fourteener couplets, Googe had to use about forty-five words to say what the Marqués said in twenty-five. Thus he threw away concision, one of the main virtues of the Proverbios and, when present, of his own style, and because of the plain abstraction of the originals he could not replace it with the imagery, wit (The Prouerbes are entirely humorless, as Peirce observes, p. 141), concretion, and fresh diction that enliven his other translations. Free from the need to fill up empty iambs, Googe generally did better with the prose gloss of Diaz. He gives lively versions of exemplary narratives about Coriolanus, Tarquin, Damon and Pithias, and others, and, when Diaz here and there generates a glimmer of irony, Googe propagates it eagerly: “aske of the Ladie Venus, howe chaunce shee hath so colde entertainement in the poore labourers houses, where you shall seldome or neuer see any of them goe mad for loue” (fol. 62; cf. 1494, sigs. F7-F7v).

Remarkably, Googe found little to disagree with in the book, although it was the work of two Catholic Spaniards. He translates some reverent verses on the Blessed Virgin without blinking (47) and endorses with notes in the margin congenial teachings on gluttony and lechery (fol. 54v) and on scripture reading (fol. 30).⁶⁶ Only once does any anti-Spanish feeling come to the surface. Diaz argues that, although one should not maintain by alms anybody capable of working, exception should be made for an able-bodied person so nobly born that “he cannot abase himself to any vile occupation.” “A right Spanish stomacke,” Googe remarks (fol. 81).

Googe made two small additions to The Prouerbes. The first, a cynical note next to a story about how Caesar himself went to court to represent a common soldier who had formerly served him, is the more biographically suggestive: “Hard for a souldier in these daies to finde a Caesar” (fol. 12). The second has more literary interest. In the gloss on proverb 84, the first four lines of Petrarch's sonnet “Ceasare poi che'l traditor d'Egitto” are quoted and then paraphrased in Spanish prose. Googe translates them into competent pentameter:

Caesar, when as the false Egyptian had
Presented him with worthie Pōpeys hed,
Hiding his ioy with coloured coūtnance sad,
His fained teares foorthwith, they say, he shed.

(fol. 99v)

By naming Pompey (Petrarch does not), Googe clarifies the application of the passage to the argument Diaz is developing, and his fourth line is a manifest improvement over a literal version of the original: “… wept with his eyes, externally, as it is written.”⁶⁷

The modicum of skill here displayed implies that, although The Prouerbes is a disappointing finale for his most productive period as a translator,⁶⁸ Googe's powers remained intact. By no means the best work of its original authors,⁶⁹ the book was written and translated into English for the specific purpose of moral pedagogy. Such works have little appeal for a sophisticated audience: the Proverbios, treasured by the Spanish people for many years, was also subjected to parody,⁷⁰ and Shakespeare's treatment of Polonius suggests the knowledgeable later Elizabethan's attitude toward the whole tradition. It is unfortunate but should not be surprising that Googe catered to a much less up-to-date taste in the works of his middle years than he did in the forward-looking poetry of his youth.

VI. THE TERRA SIGILLATA

Googe's last publication, The Wonderfull and strange effect and vertues of a new Terra Sigillata lately found out in Germanie, With the right order of the applying and administring of it: being oftentimes tried and experienced by Andreas Bertholdus of Oschatz in Misnia,⁷¹ has little or no literary value. Its curious contents and Googe's attitude toward them reveal that, then as now, men were frightened enough of death and disease to place their faith in pseudoscientific wonder drugs and that there was no lack of pious charlatans to prey on them. In tones of solemn patriotism and restrained enthusiasm, Googe dedicates to Doctors Masters and Baylie, physicians to the queen, his credulous translation of the Latin brochure that came with some medicine sent him by Hugh Morgan, “her Maiesties Apothecarie.”⁷²

After listing thirteen different types of illness, from poisoning to the plague, that are cured by the “greace of the Sunne” (p. 15) he prepares from the slag of a gold mine near his home, Bertholdus gives detailed instructions for its use. Surely this miraculous remedy is one of God's blessings on his favored nation, and it is more patriotic and economical to use the German product than similar substances imported at great expense from the land of the Turk: plenty is available for purchase at the printer's office in Frankfurt. The doubtful are referred to the testimonials of certain noblemen and officials printed at the back of the book. These documents, duly notarized or sealed patent, describe public experiments in which the medicine prevented death by poisoning—once for a group of dogs (the deaths of a control group are described in detail), once for a prisoner named Wendel Thumblart, who escaped hanging by volunteering for the test.

In his prefatory epistle, Googe adds that the medicine has been found “most effectuall in sundrie dreadfull and daungerous diseases” by his friend “M. Doctor Hector, Nunnes and diuerse others of your learned Colledge in London” (sig. A3v). His strictly practical concern is reflected in the inelegant but clear style of the translation, through which the outlines of Bertholdus's Latin syntax and, in the testimonials, a deeper layer of legal German may be discerned. Finally seated on his patrimonial lands in Lincolnshire, Googe found reason to go to press only this once, in quest of favor not from Cecil, whose help he no longer needed, but from physicians, the only men whose worldly aid, at the age of forty-seven, he now required.

Whatever their accomplishments in moral enlightenment, service to the nation, personal self-definition, or artistic beauty, most of Googe's publications had the coordinate purpose of gaining the good will of those able to better his condition. It is a tribute to his integrity, however, that he never translated anything whose value he doubted would serve his readers' best interests as well as his own. Though he did not live directly on the proceeds from his books, Googe must be considered more a professional writer than a courtly amateur. That writing was nonetheless never his primary occupation as it was for Spenser or Shakespeare may partially account for the limitations of his works.

Still, the level of competence he maintained in most of the translations discussed in this chapter might have gained Googe a more prominent station in literary history if he had expended his efforts on works of classic rank. Even had he been able to free himself from the hesitations of self-doubt, however, from the peculiar perspective of his generation, the Renaissance works he chose to “english” appeared to have unquestioned value—and Googe probably regarded the Aeneid as the property of Phaer and the Metamorphoses, which Golding rattled out in verse decidedly inferior to Googe's own in 1567, as tainted with paganism and vice. Although he hoped for lasting fame mainly as a translator, the Zodiake, The Popish Kingdome, and the Husbandry did not carry his name beyond his time. Nevertheless, they do lend weight and substance to the clear and living voice that still speaks in Googe's original poems—not least in “To the Translation of Pallingen,” his most serious meditation on “the labour swete” of his chosen craft.

Notes

1. Googe was noted and some of his works were listed by Anthony à Wood in 1691-92, although he is partly confused with one of his descendants. See Fasti Oxoniensis, part I, col. 310-11, in Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, ed. Philip Bliss (London: F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1813-20; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1967). Material on Googe was subsequently printed in such works as John Strype's Life and Acts of Matthew Parker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1821; orig. pub., 1711), pp. 286-89; Thomas Tanner's Bibliotheca Britanno-Hibernia (London: G. Bowyer, 1748; rpt. Tucson: Audax Press, 1963), pp. 332-33; Samuel Egerton Brydges's Censura Literaria (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806), II, 170, 206-208, 211-12; his Restituta (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), III, 35; IV, 307-11, 359-65; and Charles Henry Cooper and Thompson Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigiensis (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell & Co., 1858; rpt. Farnborough, Hants.: Gregg Press, 1967), II, 39-40. Brydges (Restituta, I: 364) ridicules Googe's hope for immortality even as he helps to fulfill it.

2. See Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (London: Reeves and Turner, 1871), IV, 203, 323-31. Warton's History was originally published in 1774-81; more material on Googe is added by later editors in the 1871 edition. See also Edward Philips, Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum (Canterbury: Simmons and Kirkby, 1800), pp. 123-26; Edward Farr, ed., Select Poetry Chiefly Devotional of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1845), pp. xxv, xxxvi, 388, 391-92; W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1897), II, 153-58; Harold H. Child, “The New English Poetry,” in Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1909), III, 187-215, pp. 208-10; George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 254; C. F. Tucker Brooke, “The Renaissance,” in A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948), pp. 391-92; and C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 258-59.

3. John Payne Collier, The Poetical Decameron (Edinburgh: Constable, 1820), p. 121.

4. Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker, The Renaissance in England (Boston: D. C. Heath and Co., 1954), p. 286. They have a similar opinion of George Turbervile, who is “the Rosencrantz to Googe's Guildenstern” (p. 291). Googe might not seem to academic wits quite so much like a comicstrip character if his name were still pronounced, as it apparently was in his own time, to rhyme with coach.

5. Don Cameron Allen, Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960), p. 12.

6. The Renaissance in England, p. 286.

7. Edward Arber, ed., Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes, by Barnabe Googe (Westminster: Constable, 1871, 1895), pp. 15-16.

8. R. C. Hope, ed., Reprint of The Popish Kingdome … 1570 (London: [privately printed], 1880). He includes a readable but derivative account of Googe's life.

9. John Erskine, The Elizabethan Lyric: A Study (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1905), pp. 98-101.

10. Yvor Winters, “The Sixteenth-Century Lyric in England,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse LIII (1939): 258-72, 320-35; LIV (1939): 35-51, rpt. with revisions in Winters, Forms of Discovery ([Chicago]: Alan Swallow, 1967), pp. 1-52.

11. See Alan Stephens, ed., Selected Poems of Barnabe Googe (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1961); Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 134-45; John Williams, ed., English Renaissance Poetry (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1963; rpt. New York: Norton, 1974); and William Tydeman, ed., English Poetry, 1400-1580 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), pp. 137-39, 250-51.

12. Apart from glowing commendations from his cousin Alexander Neville and his coadjutor L. Blundeston printed with his poems, Googe's own verse is praised by William Webbe in A Discourse of English Poetrie (London: Iohn Charlewood for Robert Walley, 1586), sig. C4, and seems to be included in the remarks of Richard Robinson, who in a dream sees Googe crowned with laurel and seated on Helicon along with Skelton, Lydgate, and others near the end of The rewarde of Wickednesse (London: William Williamson, 1573/4), sig. Q2v, as well as in the salute given him by Gabriel Harvey in Pierces Supererogation (1593), in Harvey's Works, ed. A. B. Grosart (London: [privately printed], 1884), II, 290.

13. See Jasper Heywood's preface to his translation of The second tragedie of Seneca entituled Thyestes (London, 1560), sigs. *7v-*8 (quoted by Arber, pp. 5-6); T. B.'s preface to John Studley's translation of The eyght tragedie of Seneca, entituled Agamemnon (London: T. Colwell, 1566), sig. A1; Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), pp. 145-46; Arthur Hall's dedicatory epistle to his Ten Books of Homers Iliades, translated out of French (London: Ralph Newberie, 1581); and Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598), ed. Don Cameron Allen (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1938), fol. 285v.

14. See C. H. Conley, The First English Translators of the Classics (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1927; rpt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1967).

15. The precise nature of the kinship between Googe and Cecil has never been specified, and my efforts to trace it through the genealogical tables published by the Harleian Society and others have yielded only the impression that the connection was a matter of broad family alliances rather than a close and definite blood or marital tie between two individuals. One actual link is perhaps the exception that proves the rule: the third husband of Googe's maternal grandmother, Sir James Hales, was the grandson of Robert Atwater; Atwater's daughter Mary was the mother of a Robert Honeywood (whose son Thomas Googe called “cousin”); Robert Honeywood's wife Elizabeth Browne was the granddaughter of Sir William Fitzwilliams, Lord Deputy to Ireland and patron of Googe, who was the brother-in-law of Sir Anthony Cooke, father of Mildred, second wife of Sir William Cecil.

16. By sonnet, of course, Googe meant any short poem not otherwise designated. There are, however, two right sonnets in his collection, overlooked by some because they were printed in lines broken after the second foot. See Hoyt H. Hudson, “Sonnets by Barnabe Googe,” PMLA LXVIII (1933): 293-94, and P. N. U. Harting, “The ‘Sonettes’ of Barnabe Googe,” English Studies XI (1929): 100-102. A third sonnet has been observed in Googe's translation of a passage from Columella in the Fovre Bookes of Husbandry (1577), sig. G3v, by Brooke Peirce in “Barnabe Googe: Poet and Translator,” Diss. Harvard, 1954, p. 122.

17. See Googe's standard defense of poetry in the preface “To the vertuous and frendely Reader,” Zodiake, 1565, sigs.(‡)2-(‡)4.

18. This holds true for, among others, George Turbervile, Geoffrey Fenton, and Thomas Howell. George Gascoigne seems to have been following it before his death in 1577. Cf. the related generational model discussed in Richard Helgerson's Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), esp. pp. 4-15.

19. Warton, [ed. Hazlitt,] IV, 328. Gordon Braden offers an interesting discussion of the problems and possibilities of the fourteener in “Golding's Ovid,” part one of his The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 22-35.

20. As has been pointed out by John Thompson, The Founding of English Metre (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 66-68.

21. See George Gascoigne, “Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English” (1575), in English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963).

22. The pentameter lines in EE & S are likewise split after the second foot, but the only result is confusion to the reader. In quoting, I have followed the printed text in the case of long lines, but have indicated the break in pentameters only by inserting a virgule (/).

23. Winters, Poetry LIII, (1939): 264-65; Winters, Forms of Discovery, pp. 19-20. See also Stephens, pp. 15-16.

24. A detailed discussion of this issue may be found in Richard Jacob Panofsky, “A Descriptive Study of English Mid-Tudor Short Poetry,” Diss. University of California, Santa Barbara, 1975. I am indebted to Panofsky throughout my book.

25. See Veré L. Rubel, Poetic Diction in the English Renaissance (New York: Modern Language Assoc. of America, 1941), pp. 134-36, 171-74. See also Peirce, pp. 263-68.

26. Robert Pinsky, The Situation of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), p. 4.

27. Sir Fulke Greville's Life of Sir Philip Sidney … (1652), ed. Nowell Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), p. 224.

28. Zodiake, 1565, sigs. *6v, (‡)4.

29. See J. E. L. Oulton, “Rufinus's Translation of the Church History of Eusebius,” Journal of Theological Studies XXX (1929): 150-74. I have consulted a photo-copy of Ecclesiastica Historia diui Eusebii: et Ecclesiastica historia gentis anglorum venerabilis Bede (Strassburg: George Husner, 1500), hereinafter referred to as Rufinus, 1500; but in quoting I follow the modernized orthography of the edition of Rufinus by Theodore Mommsen in Eusebius, Kirchengeschichte, ed. Eduard Schwartz (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs Buchhandlung, 1903).

30. Rufinus, 1500, sigs. E3-E4; cf. Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. Kirsopp Lake, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1926), I, 343-55.

31. Rufinus: “… ita ut pedem laederet praeceps actus” (IV, 15, 16; Mommsen, I, 343).

32. Rufinus's interpolation appears in Book VII, chapter 25, which corresponds to Book VII, chapter 28 of Lake. His version of the story differs from that in Gregory of Nyssa's life of St. Gregory the Wonder Worker (Migne, PG, 46: 914-18) and from that in the independent anonymous Latin life as well. See W. Telfer, “The Latin Life of St Gregory Thaumaturgus,” Journal of Theological Studies XXXI (1929-30): 142-55, 354-62.

33. On Bale's connections with Naogeorgus, see Charles H. Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1886), pp. 131-38; Honor C. McCusker, John Bale: Dramatist and Antiquary (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971; orig. pub. 1942), pp. 94-95; and (for a negative view on the question of influence) Thora Balslev Blatt, The Plays of John Bale: A Study of Ideas, Technique and Style (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad, 1969), pp. 164-81.

34. The Regnum Papisticum was published in Basel in 1553 and issued in revised form in 1559. Googe used the later edition (see Peirce, p. 95, n. 2). The Agricultura Sacra was published in Basel (1550). For Bale's life and opinions, see McCusker, pp. 1-28, and Blatt, pp. 9-19.

35. The Popish Kingdome was printed in London by Henrie Denham for Richard Watkins in 1570 and was not reprinted until 1880. … It was reprinted again in 1972 by Johnson Reprint Co. Neither reprint contains “The Spirituall Husbandrie.” The fourth book and part of the third are included in Phillip Stubbes's Anatomy of the Abuses in England in Shakespeare's Youth, a.d. 1583, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: New Shakspere Society, 1877-79), pp. 323-48.

36. See Roy Pascal, German Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), pp. 63-64; see also pp. 213-14. Cf. Herford, pp. xxv, 129-31; Fritz Wiener, Naogeorgus im England der Reformationszeit (Berlin: [n.p.], 1907), pp. 51-66; and The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed. James Arthur Muller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970; orig. pub. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1933), pp. 129-40. Further information on Naogeorgus, whose birthdate is variously given as 1505, 1508, and 1511, and who died in 1563, may be found in Herford, pp. 93, 120-24, and in Hans-Gert Roloff, “Thomas Naogeorgs Judas—ein Drama der Reformationszeit,” Archiv für das Studium der Neuren Sprachen und Literaturen CCVIII (1971): 81-101.

37. Besides Furnivall, see [William] Hone, [The] Every-Day Book [(London: T. Tegg, 1827; rpt. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1967)]; John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (London: Charles Knight, 1841-42); and Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), I, 139-40; II, 528-34.

38. See Wiener, pp. 114-31, and Peirce, pp. 98, 102-104.

39. Wiener describes the original and Googe's translation, pp. 132-39. See Herford, p. 121, for the suggestion that Naogeorgus meant the work as a Christian parallel to Vergil's Georgics.

40. The Latin is Christophori Ballistae Parhisiensis in Podagrā concertatio, ad Reuerendissimum in Christo patrem, illustrissimumque principem, Dominum Philippum de Platea, Sedunensem Episcopum. Adiectus est dialogus inter Podagram & Christophorum Ballistam. Ad tria tendo (Zurich?, 1525? or 1528?). Information on the author, on the poems, their tradition, and the translation, has been compiled by Robert Schuler in the introduction and notes to his critical edition of the first of the two poems in Three Renaissance Scientific Poems, No. 5 of Studies in Philology LXXV (1978), pp. 67-107. I am grateful to Professor Schuler for letting me see the text of his commentary in advance of publication, and I am indebted to him in the pages that follow. To the ascription of this translation to Googe in Kennedy, Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature, IV, 285, which was supported by Peirce, Schuler adds his endorsement, along with some further evidence of contact between Googe and Masters as servants of Cecil.

    Peirce's account of the work (pp. 41-42, 154-57, 159-75) includes a comparison of the translation with the original Latin that reveals Googe's “characteristic fidelity to the language and figures of his original” (p. 162) and notes instances of his habitual diction and phraseology.

41. Schuler shows the main sources to be Pliny's Natural History and the Materia Medica of Dioscorides Pedanius.

42. He does delete a discussion of the relative immunity of menstruating women to the gout (see Peirce, p. 165).

43. Rei rusticae libri quatuor, vniuersam rusticam disciplinam complectentes, vna cum appendice oraculorum cornidas adiecta. Item, de venatione, aucupio atque piscatione compendium (Cologne: Iohannes Burckmann, 1570). On Heresbach, see Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969), VII, 606-607. See also the facsimile edition of the first book of Rei rusticae by Wilhelm Abel, with a facing page German translation by Helmut Dreitzel, Vier Bücher über Landwirtschaft, Band I, Vom Landblau (Meisenheim: A. Hain, 1970).

44. In a line added to the Husbandry he remarks on “Linconshyre, a countrey replenished with Gentlemen of good houses, and good house keepers” (sig. Y3v).

45. Googe inadvertently omits a half-dozen names cited by Heresbach in his similar list and adds one of his own, “Tragus,” to be discussed below. The contributions of some of the Englishmen listed are specified in the text; some, like Tusser, seem to be mentioned out of courtesy only. The idea that the names may represent “missing Tudor books on farming” has been demolished by Peirce (pp. 40-41). Googe also cites British authorities he neglects to list, including Reynolde (Reginald) Scot's A Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden (1574) and Thomas Blundeville's The Fower Chiefyst Offices Belonging to Horsemanshippe (1565, 1566)—see sigs. H8v, P2v.

46. I.e., John Fitzherbert's Boke of Husbandry, published under that and other titles ten times between 1523 and 1568 (STC 10994-11003). To his friend and later commander in Ireland, Sir Nicholas Malbie, Googe attributes an “infallible” treatment for horses (sig. Q3v) taken from Malbie's A Plaine and Easie Way to Remedie a Horse that is Foundered in his Feete (1576).

47. I.e., Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), author of Ars curandi parva (Basel: Ex Officina Henricpetrina, 1566); Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1500-1577), whose commentary on Dioscorides's Materia Medica (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1568) was widely disseminated in various versions (cf. the facsimile edition, Rome: [n.p.], 1970); and Hieronymus Bock (1498-1554), author of De stirpivm … commentarium libri tres (Strassburg: V. Rihelius, 1552).

48. Cf. Bock, [Heironymus. De stirpium … commentarium libri tres (Strassburg: V. Rihelius, 1552)] sig. Cc3 (p. 405). The style and contents of the two drawings are identical, but the various parts of the plant are differently arranged.

49. Webbe, [William. A Discourse of English Poetrie (London: Iohn Charlewood for Robert Walley, 1586)] sig. F1v.

50. See Rowland E. Prothero, Lord Ernle, English Farming, Past and Present (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972; orig pub. 1917), pp. 89, 99-100.

51. On the cat and the malt heap, see Tilley, [Morris Palmer. A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1950)] C177 (p. 88).

52. See Foster, Santillana. See also José Amador de los Rios, ed., Obras … de Santillana (Madrid: José Rodriquez, 1852); Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, “Estudio Preliminar” to his selected, modernized edition of the Proverbios (Madrid: Atlas, 1944); Rafael Lapesa, La obra literaria del Marqués de Santillana (Madrid: Insula, 1957); Mario Schiff, La bibliothèque du Marquis de Santillane (Paris: Librarie Émile Bouillon, 1905); and, on Santillana's humanist predilections, Arnold Reichenberger, “The Marqués de Santillana and the Classical Tradition,” Ibero-romania I (1969): 5-34, and Miguel Garci-Gómez, “The Reaction against Medieval Romances: Its Spanish Forerunners,” Neophilologus LX (1976) 220-32.

53. Diaz wrote a Diálogo é razonamiento en la muerte del Marqués de Santillana, printed in Opusculos Literarios de los siglos XIV á XVI, ed. A. Paz y Melia, Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, vol. XIX (Madrid, 1892), pp. 245-360, a commentary on the adages of “Seneca” (Publilius Syrus) (see note 30, below), and prefaces to other works he translated for the Marqués. See Schiff, passim. See also Paz y Melia, pp. xiii-xiv.

54. See Schiff, pp. xxiii, xxvi, and José Simon Díaz, Bibliografia de la literatura Hispánica (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigationes Científicas, 1950-), III, 693. See also Los Proverbios con su Glosa, Incunables Poeticos Castellanos, XI (Valencia: Artes Gráficas Soler, 1965), a facsimile of the Seville edition of 1494.

55. See Pulgar, Claros varones de Castilla, ed. Robert Brian Tate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), esp. pp. li-lii; see also Biographie Universelle (Paris: Michaud Frères, 1811-28), XXXVI, 313-14.

56. Prouerbios y Sentencias de Lucio Anneo Seneca, y de Don Yñigo Lopez de Mendoça, Marques de Santillana. Glosados por el Doctor Pedro Diaz de Toledo (Antwerp: Iuan Steelsio, 1552); Simon Díaz No. 3450. Googe did not translate any of the first (“Senecan”) part of the volume nor the introductions by Diaz and Santillana that precede the second part. The 1552 edition varies from the MS.-based text in the Obras in ways similar to the printed text of 1494, as in the omission of the ninety-third proverb. Googe always follows 1552 when it differs from 1494, as in the omission of the seventh proverb plus some surrounding prose, in errors in the headings and numeration of chapters, and in the quotation of four lines from Petrarch (see below, p. 115). Finally, a passage on military discipline in Pulgar's portrait of Santillana (Tate, ed., pp. 22-23) is absent both from 1552 and from Googe's translation.

57. J. B. Trend, ed., Prose and Verse [by the] Marqués de Santillana (London: Dolphin Bookshop, 1940), p. xvi.

58. According to Pulgar, but see Pelayo, pp. 21-22.

59. See Obras, ed. Amador de los Rios, pp. 21-22.

60. Cf. his chapters “of Duetie to Parents” and “of Age” (fols. 103-112). Diaz seconds him in the gloss, fols. 24-27v, 109-112.

61. I cite the proverbs as numbered by Googe. See note 30, above.

62. As Googe recognized them to be, rather than true popular proverbs, in his epistle dedicatory.

63. Foster shares this judgment [Foster, David William. The Marques of Santillana, Twayne's World Author Series 154 (New York: Twayne, 1971)] (pp. 69-70, 72).

64. In his prologue, Santillana disclaimed any attempt at originality (Obras, ed. Amador de los Rios, p. 26; cf. Schiff, p. lxxxi).

65. See Schiff, p. lxxxi: “ils restent sans effort dans l'oreille de qui les a entendus.”

66. Googe's marginalia are sparse, some perhaps having been omitted by the printer, as he seems to imply in the dedicatory epistle. He may have intended to enter more objections. There are no marginalia in 1552.

67. Durling, ed. and trans., Petrarch's Lyric Poems, p. 204 (No. 102).

68. See Peirce, pp. 141, 145-46, for a similar opinion.

69. On Santillana, see Foster, p. 69. Diaz is more ambitious and coherent in his Diálogo.

70. See Schiff, pp. xxiii, xxxvi.

71. Printed by Robert Robinson for Richard Watkins, London, 1587. “The Epistle” is signed “Aluingham this 14. of August, 1587 … B.G.” Peirce shows that this work and the Gout may be attributed to Googe as an indivisible pair (pp. 154-57).

72. A copy of the original is in the British Museum: Bertholdus (Andreas), Terrae sigillatae, nuper in Germania repertae, vires atque virtutes admirandae, eiusque administrandae ac vsurpandae ratio (Frankfort: C. Rab, 1583).